You know Dasher and Dancer and Prancer and Vixen. And yes, you still recall the most famous reindeer of all.
But how did that red-nosed misfit become a star of Yuletide celebrations? He wasn’t one of the original eight tiny reindeer, after all. Who gave him to us?
Would you believe it was a Jewish man with a dying wife who had a little daughter and worked for a big company?
Robert May (Bob to his family and friends) grew up in New York in the early 20th century. When the Great Depression hit, his wealthy Jewish family was ruined.
Bob and his wife, Evelyn, moved to Chicago, where he found work as a copywriter for Montgomery Ward’s famous catalogs. The pay was low, but in those days, just having a job was a blessing. Daughter Barbara was soon born.
But the Mays’ happiness didn’t last long.
Evelyn developed cancer in 1937. That diagnosis was a death sentence then. Like any loving spouse, Bob spent every penny he had (and then some) on the best medical treatment as he watched his wife waste away.
Bob’s boss gave him a special assignment in January 1939. Montgomery Ward gave kids a free holiday book every Christmas. Though it was popular, the promotion was costly. The boss wanted to save money by producing its own book for the next Christmas shopping season. He told Bob to write it.
Oh, and make it an animal story, he added.
Bob wondered as he returned to his desk how an animal related to Christmas. Piece by piece, answers came to him.
He remembered how, when they visited Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo, the now four-year-old Barbara was crazy about deer.
As Evelyn grew sicker, Bob spent hours at her bedside talking with her each night. She told how she’d been painfully shy as a child, and how other kids made fun of her and excluded her from their games.
That got Bob thinking about his project. As he remembered later, “Suppose he (the book’s main character) were an underdog, a loser, yet triumphant in the end. But what kind of loser? Certainly, a reindeer’s dream would be to pull Santa’s sleigh.”
Pondering that while staring out his office window one day, nature came to the rescue. Thick fog from Lake Michigan blocked the view. “Suddenly, I had it! A nose! A bright red nose that would shine through fog like a spotlight.”
He tried different names. Reginald… Rollo… then Rudolph. That was it: Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.
Bob had his story. He excitedly took it to his boss.
And the boss hated it.
He really, really hated it, saying, “For gosh sakes, Bob, can’t you do better than that?”
But Bob refused to give up on Rudolph. He asked a friend in the company’s art department, “Could you draw a deer with a big red nose and still make him look appealing?”
The next Saturday morning, Bob, little Barbara, and the artist visited the zoo’s deer corral. On Monday morning, they took the likeness to the boss. “Bob,” he said softly, “forget what I said before and put that story into finished form.”
Bob began writing it as a poem. As he did, Evelyn died in July.
He was understandably devastated. His boss suggested he take time off work and hand over the project to someone else. Bob shook his head. “I needed Rudolph now more than ever. Gratefully, I buried myself in the work. Finally, in late August, it was done.”
Bob called Barbara and Evelyn’s parents into their living room and read them the finished poem. “In their eyes I could see that the story accomplished what I had hoped,” he recalled.
When the little book was released to Montgomery Ward customers that Christmas, it was an instant hit. The company distributed 2.5 million copies. By 1946, it had grown to 6 million.
That same year, a recording company wanted to produce a spoken word version of the poem. But there was a problem: Montgomery Ward owned the rights to Rudolph’s story and image.
Some brave soul took the matter directly to Ward’s big boss, the notoriously crusty, tough-as-nails Sewell Avery. Yet something touched Avery’s heart. Maybe it was sympathy for Bob having lost his wife; maybe it was appreciation for all the favorable publicity Bob’s creation had generated for Wards. Whatever the reason, to everyone’s utter astonishment, Avery handed over the rights to Rudolph to Bob — Lock, stock and barrel.
A few years later, Bob’s brother-in-law wrote the famous song we learned as children. Bing Crosby, Dinah Shore, and a host of others passed on it. Cowboy singer Gene Autry finally put it on vinyl just to make his wife stop pestering him about it. Even then, it was the “B Side” to another holiday song. But Autry changed his tune when “Rudolph” became the Number 1 hit song in America for Christmas week 1949, selling 2.5 million copies that year alone.
Countless books, a TV special, and even a 2014 U. S. Postal Service stamp honored Rudolph, too.
And, just as the other reindeer promised, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer did indeed go down in history.